Eating 9 meals per day may cut your cholesterol and help you stay slim

Suggesting that eating little and often is healthier for us, experts have said that we should eat as many as nine meals every day.

They say this may help lower blood pressure and cholesterol, and even encourage weight loss, the Daily Mail reported.

"Splitting food intake so we eat many times a day will have metabolic benefits over and above the same food consumed in a small number of meals," the paper quoted Dr Susan Jebb, head of the Medical Research Council's Human Nutrition Research Unit, as saying.

In one of the latest studies, scientists from Imperial College, London, compared the diets of more than 2,000 people from the UK, Japan, China and the U.S.

While they all had the same calorie intake and food, half the participants ate fewer than six times a day, while the remainder ate more than six times.

Results show the first group had a significantly higher systolic blood pressure — the pressure that blood exerts on vessels while the heart is beating — compared with the more frequent eaters. They were also significantly heavier.

Another research from the University of Athens, based on more than 2,000 children aged nine to 13, found those who ate five times a day were 32.6per cent less likely to have high levels of bad cholesterol than those who ate fewer meals.

Meanwhile, eating at least four small meals a day — a 'nibbling' diet, as researchers called it — sped up metabolism and lowered the risk of obesity, according to a Maastricht University study.

It's not clear why eating more often has these benefits, but one theory is that frequent meals prevent a high influx of fatty acids — compounds that are released from foods and can lead to a build-up of fats in the arteries, and also contribute to high cholesterol levels.

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